[Sussex] AMD - ATI (Open Source)

[Steven Dobson]

Andrew

On Tue, 2006-08-22 at 21:45 +0100, Andrew Guard wrote:
> Now AMD buying ATI looking more and more likely it going to happen.  What
> do I see AMD having a go at IBM and Oracle to be more open source.
> 
> Intersting, so I take it AMD will open source things with ATI then?
> 
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08/22/amd_oracle_ibm_licensing/

I didn't read that as an argument for AMD, Oracle or IBM to be more
"open source".  All three are as "open source" as they need to be to
best support their businesses (as they see it).  For example, as
hardware manifactorous, it is in IBM's and AMD's intrests to support
FLOSS.  The more software that runs one your hardware the larger the
potentional users bases and thereore the greate the sales oppotunities..

The problem that I saw in the articel was that database market has
matured.  At last year's (or maybe the year before) I was speaking with
one of the Oracle db experts and he was open enough to admit that for
most db users an earlier version Oracle (7 I think he said) contained
all the functionality that they wanted or used.

Oracle have seen this as a problem for quite a while.  I think they
tried to buy the company behind MySQL; when they couldn't they started
buying the companies that provided data engines for MySQL.

For IBM it is less of a problem.  Sure MySQL is a direct competitor for
DB2.  However, IBM make a nice shinny penny of selling support for and
hardware that runs Linux.  You want to run DB2 on Linux on an IBM
mainframe - sure that's not a problem.  You want to use Oracle rather
than DB2 - sure that's not a problem either you can buy your hardware
and OS support from IBM, but you'll need to go to Oracle and buy your
support for the database from them.

But IBM has the potental to have an Oracle killer here.  They could take
the data engine out of DB2, GPL it and plug it into MySQL.  This would
allow MySQL to add those db features that their current set of data
engines can't support but DB2 can.

I can almost here the IBM sales pitch now:  IBM can not only sell you
the hardware and support of it and the OS, but if you go with MySQL+DB2
we can support the entire software stack upto your application in one
support contract.

That very attractive to most companies.

If a problem developes somewhere in the software stack a bun fight can
ensue.  The various vendors of the different elements of your stack all
point their fingers at someone else saying "it's not our problem it's
theirs."  When you get your support form one vender (say IBM) then it
doesn't matter which element of the stack has the issues the owner of
the problem is clear and it is they that must find and fix the problem.

And if you don't think that is want IBM may do, why not?  It is exactly
what they did with AIX and Linux.  JFS (Journaling File System), RCU
(Read, Copy, and Update), NUMA (Non-uniform Memory Access) are all
tecnologies that IBM have taken from AIX and insert in Linux.  If they
can do it with a competing operating systems then they can do it with
competing databases too.

Steve